Spicebush

A healthy, flowering tree that never sets fruit year after year - either a male tree, or a female with no male nearby.

Add a male pollinator (or graft a male branch onto a female tree, or plant a self-fruitful cultivar); nothing else will make a lone female or a male tree fruit.

Plant both a male and a female (or a self-fruitful cultivar like 'Meader'); when buying seedlings, expect roughly half to be non-fruiting males, and site a known male within pollination range of females.

American persimmon is usually dioecious - trees are male or female, and only females bear fruit, generally needing a male within a few hundred feet to pollinate them. A lone male, or a female with no pollinator, produces no crop, a common surprise for new growers.

Spicebush is a moisture- and shade-loving woodland shrub, so sun exposure is half the problem here - it scorches and thins in a hot open position even where the soil is reasonable.

Wilting on hot afternoons, browning and crisping along leaf edges and tips, premature leaf drop, collapsed flower stems, and thin, stunted growth - showing up first on young plants and on the driest, most exposed side of the planting.

Water deeply and consistently, then mulch. Mild wilting reverses within a day or two, but a prolonged drought sets a plant back hard and can kill a young one outright. If a plant scorches every summer, the site is wrong - move it to damper ground rather than trying to water it through.

Match the site to the plant: put a moisture-loving species where the ground actually stays damp - a rain garden, pond edge, ditch, seep or low spot - rather than in an ordinary border you intend to keep watered. Mulch to hold moisture and keep the roots cool, water deeply through every dry spell while the plant is establishing, and avoid hot, windy, exposed positions.

Not a pest but a siting problem, and on a moisture-loving plant it is usually the thing that actually kills it. When the soil dries out, leaf edges brown and crisp, foliage wilts and drops early, flowering and fall color are cut short, and growth thins. Hot sun, wind and exposed positions make it worse by pulling water out faster than the roots can replace it. A plant that wants reliably moist or wet ground has no drought tolerance to fall back on, and young or recently planted ones have the least of all.

Leaves folded into shelters and remarkable green caterpillars with large fake 'snake eye' spots feeding on the foliage.

None - welcome the caterpillars; never spray a butterfly host plant.

None wanted - this is a host plant; plant spicebush precisely to feed these butterflies.

Not really a pest - the celebrated spicebush swallowtail (and promethea moth) caterpillars feed on the leaves. Some leaf loss is the whole ecological point of the plant, and healthy shrubs shrug it off.